


Something Terrible

by Interrobang



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: A lil dark, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24491965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobang/pseuds/Interrobang
Summary: "Something terrible was done to me, and so I became terrible."A darker look at Genji's story, leading up to his recruitment into Overwatch.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	Something Terrible

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all. This was a commission for a friend! Fandom seems to jump directly into Genji forgiving Hanzo, but I'm sure there was a period of his life in which he was rightfully furious about his lot in life. I wanted to reflect that a bit here.

The long trip down his darkest path started further back than Genji could fully remember, in the nebulous space where memories became a fog of sensation: being held in his mother’s arms; staring at the ceiling from his crib; struggling to stand, tripping over his own feet. Later, his feet pounding on wood and tatami as he ran wild throughout the Shimadas’ estate. Being taught how to hold a fist so he wouldn’t break his fingers. Being taught to kick and keep his balance. Swimming in the koi pond and being spanked. His first time breaking a board, the crack of wood under his hand.

And always, Hanzo by his side. Guiding, teaching, playing the accomplice when he was not the leader. Holding Genji’s hand tightly, running ahead on bare feet down the straight wooden boards of the halls in their home. Another sensation: the light through paper walls, shadows on the other side. Raised voices, the two of them shying away from people they were not meant to see.

His father rarely factored into these early memories. His mother was there for a short time, in vague slips of memory: a cool hand on his forehead when he was sick, a soft voice singing him goodnight, a pinch on his cheek when she was overcome with love and needed to squeeze him to let him know. Her hair, tied up elaborately when in traditional dress; her hair, long and flowing down her shoulders like an inky cascade when they were home alone.

When his father did factor into things, the initial impression was of hardness. He had a firm hand. It was often a guiding hand, like Genji’s brother’s, but rough and calloused, with thick veins from years of tension. Beautiful hands, hands that knew how to be wielded like a weapon. They were the kind of hands that could hold together an empire. 

Genji knew from a young age that he was the least favorite of his father’s when it came to him and Hanzo, and yet— for some reason— he was the most tolerated. Hanzo was favored in a way that Genji was not: Hanzo was the heir to the throne, to the clan, to the seat at the head of the table. And Genji was expected to sit at his right hand, someday. To lead with an iron fist, but always below Hanzo in the pecking order. There was a kind of pity that came with that fate.

Their father tolerated Genji. Doted on him when he was small. Placated him, and played with him, and listened to his small-child babble. He named him Sparrow, the little bird at his shoulder.

It was when Genji started to express his own opinions that things turned sour. The nickname, Sparrow, took on a note of derision. Now he was a simple creature, singing every thought in his head, focused only on the immediacy of his feelings. His father pulled back, and his smile took on a nest of tired wrinkles around it. His eyes turned hard. 

“Stop your chattering, Sparrow,” he snapped once while they were sitting in the garden. “Let your body be still.”

Genji had gulped in air and held it for all of five seconds before bursting into questions again. Asking what kind of birds they had in their courtyard, why the birds left in winter, why other birds came to visit then, what they would eat for lunch.

His father had sighed and smiled, tired, and patted his head, and told him that some birds were better suited for harsh conditions than others, and that they would have soup.

He got older. His father got older, too. His father became weak-spirited and mean. Sparrow now meant a flighty thing, unable to settle down or take responsibility. His father thought him light-hearted and thoughtless. As Genji settled into his teen years he felt the nickname tighten around him like a collar. His father had this idea of him and of who he was— of what he would one day be. He had some idea, however right or wrong, of how Genji would conduct himself in the role given to him. 

But _was_ he wrong?

Genji moved forward as much as he was able, on the path he was allowed.

And still Hanzo was there, steps ahead of him.

They evolved in parallel, him and Hanzo. Three years his senior, Hanzo was three years ahead of him on the path to bitterness. Hanzo turned hard and cold and focused as he got older, though he could still occasionally be pulled away from meetings and cram school to hit the arcade for a few games on the walk home.

The collar wasn’t always tight. 

But sometimes it cut into Genji’s neck, chafed against his skin, squeezed and bruised his trachea until he wasn’t sure if he was even breathing anymore, so tight was his throat.

Genji fought. He resisted the path the family put him on, lashing out and looking for other ways to live his life. He took every skill the family had instilled in him and used it against them. 

Genji graduated as salutatorian of his class, though that meant nothing when Hanzo had been valedictorian of his own three years prior. He managed to get out of Hanamura long enough to say he attended college at least briefly. Spent most of it smoking and drinking and shooting poison into his veins or snorting it into his lungs. He just wanted the world to spin without him for a moment.

He buried himself in blackouts. Death was a way out, if not the most ideal. Being conscious meant he had to see the path ahead of him for the next sixty years or more. Arranged marriage. Children that he would have to set on the same thorny path he’d been on. Business, meetings, fighting, blood on his hands while he was buried in bureaucracy.

Somewhere around the time he left university for good, he and Hanzo took their final fork in the road, and chose different branches. Like one of the elders’ bonsai trees, Hanzo allowed himself to be molded and shaped, guided into the proud line of leadership he was due. His eyes turned dark like their father’s, his hands closed, his mouth tense. He turned away, leaving Genji to run wild, with only a few beatings to drag him back when he needed to make a statement.

And then: a light in the dark, a single match burning in a dark corner of Genji’s favorite cesspool bar, and everything changed. McCree lit up, offered him a pull, and they were best friends for the length of a cigarette.

They met again. And again. In different places, different times, different selves. Always, a shared light, five minutes of air together, a few words exchanged.

Genji had found his way out. They were going to steal him away. They were going to take a cutting off the expansive Shimada family tree. There would be a period of adjustment, but Genji could finally put down roots somewhere new. 

And so Genji sold the family out in small increments. Distant cousins went first. Not even blood relatives, cousins only in name. The step-daughter of the sister of the wife of their third-cousin’s youngest son. They’d each only committed the smallest of transgressions, but each was a thread in the web Genji had started to string. 

There wasn’t anything the Shimadas could link back to Genji. He was a shadow, as they had trained him to be. All Genji needed to do was share a cigarette with a friend, exchange a few words, and he could go back to pretending nothing was choking him.

At first, the family was happy that Genji seemed to be accepting his role at last. They welcomed him in, albeit warily. His father's eyes softened a fraction when they looked at him at Hanzo’s side, strategizing together, giving his input on family matters.

But then his father took ill, and his hard eyes went cool and empty. It was just Genji and Hanzo now, in the end. Just the two of them waiting for their father to die so that a new era could come to pass, with Hanzo reigning and Genji at his side.

This was their last chance. _Genji’s_ last chance.

And so he did a foolish thing: he begged Hanzo to come with him. To abandon the empire and let it collapse in on itself. Genji had found a way— knew people— knew places— 

But it fell on deaf ears.

Worse, it enraged Hanzo. There in the temple where they'd mourned their mother, Hanzo cut Genji down with his own blade, then summoned his dragons against Genji and made them eat him alive. 

Hanzo dumped him over the cliffs. _That_ Genji remembered clearly, though the rest blurred into a fog. The rest of the night, even years later, was a long, bloody smudge in his memories: his limbs limp like a shredded rag doll in the mouth of a lava-hot beast, eviscerating him, tearing him inside out, and then the the long fall, weightless, soaring over the precipice until the clay and stones knocked all the air and blood out of him.

And then an angel flying down to him like something out of an old oil painting. She had wings made of light and a grimace on her face as she packed him into a series of plastic bags and stuck him full of tubes and packing cloth to keep him together as he was lifted away from the ravine he’d been dumped in. He was just a mash of bones and meat when she patted his tattered face and told him he was safe now.

And when he woke, it was dark. He opened his eyes, and still he could not see. 

And then a light: an e-cig, one of the cheesy out-moded ones made to look like the real thing, lighting up with an LED-bright glow next to him. It lit up a face, familiar but drawn grimmer than Genji had ever seen it before. 

“You have one eye right now, and it ain’t doing too great. We’re working on getting you a second one. Working on getting you most things, to be honest. There ain’t a lot of you left right now.” A slow draw, and the scent of tobacco-laced vapor. “Least your brain’s intact. They can replace most things these days, but they ain’t figured out how to port over an organic personality yet.”

Genji couldn’t even grunt. Couldn’t cough to clear his throat— did he have a throat? Couldn’t move. He could feel one arm, bound from fingertips to shoulder in stiff bandages. Could feel his bladder, one lung, and his heart rattling away in his chest. The rest of him was seemingly missing. 

He blinked in the dark, and flashes came to him: swords, knives, hands, teeth. The flash of lightning in his brother’s eyes. The flare of magic down his blade, sparking into the furious blue glow of his brother’s beasts. 

His arm, flying away. His leg, bending backwards. His intestines falling like so many slippery ropes to the dirt when he reached out to his brother’s retreating form. 

“We’ll fix you up, don’t you worry.”

They did fix him, eventually. Built him a body. And yet again purpose was thrust on him. Overwatch may not have been a yakuza empire, but they were still a powerful organization with many moving pieces, and they still had a place they wanted Genji to fit.

They forged him to their own specifications. It felt like every week he had some limb or organ switched out. For months he was clumsy, constantly readjusting to the different weights and balances of his parts, or recovering from some surgery on his existing tissues.

By the end of a year, he was a mockery of a man-shape, angry and sharp and capable of terrible things.

After all, was that not what had been done to him? Did it not make sense that he should do terrible things in return? Energy begets energy, a perpetual motion carried on endlessly, transferred in propulsion like some terrible wave.

They honed his anger, and turned it on the people he hated most. They would not let him strike at the heart of the clan, at the people he wanted to hurt most. His father died, but it was not by Genji’s hand, and he wept angry tears for it. Then Hanzo succeeded their father, and Genji watched the ceremony from afar. His brother’s face was more deeply lined than anyone his age’s had a right to be. 

Genji’s anger was an inferno burning in his chest at all times. His dragon was still in his heart, and both it and he wanted to raze the clan to the ground. It was only luck that Overwatch wanted the same thing and was willing to use their brand new weapon to do it.

The hangers-on, the cousins, the elders: one by one, Genji brought them down like flies plucked out of the air by a hungry bird: making trouble one minute, missing the next, nary a mess to be found. Genji slit throats as cleanly as he knew how. He felt the blood rush over his hands, hot and slick and visceral, and felt no satisfaction. Genji always held them while they breathed their last. He held them as he had never been held by them.

It was like plucking petals off a chrysanthemum with a thousand parts. Genji picked them off one by one, discarding bodies into dirt, snow, bed sheets, with one parting word and a hand to feel the last pulse of their heart, and one last goodbye.

Hanzo was alone in his castle, and Genji was going to bring him down brick by brick.

He would burn as he had been burned. He would cut as he had been cut. He would kill as he had been killed, and maybe that would be enough.

Something terrible had been done to him, and so he would become terrible.

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to see what else I'm up to these days, follow me on Twitter @GoInterrobang.


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